Renewable energy jobs versus fossil fuel jobs

September 19, 2013, 5:32PM

09/19/2013

Staff writer Kendall Fields needs to change a fact in her mostly accurate reporting of Bill McKibben’s talk last Sunday.

Rather than “alarming drops in sea levels,” as Fields inadvertently wrote, sea levels are rising, not dropping. I would also like to take this opportunity to add an important fact that Mr. McKibben shared – that fossil fuel projects like the proposed XL Pipeline will initially only create about 2,000 jobs as it is constructed, and then drop to an estimated 65 jobs to monitor the line. Contrast those meager numbers with my own estimates of the thousands of jobs needed to construct, install and monitor billions of solar, wind and wave devices that can dramatically lower our dependence on fossil fuels, clean up our environment and improve the economy – all at the same time.